Yesterday AKSARBENT blamed State Sen. Beau McCoy for torpedoing Nebraska's Unicameral-mandated climate change study by inserting the unscientific (in terms of climate change) word "cyclical" in order to sacrifice free scientific inquiry at the altar of GOP political correctness. We also saw the fingerprints of Gov. Dave Heineman all over this debacle:

Nothing Ken Haar said tonight to Rachel Maddow has dissuaded us from either contention.
Maddow's customary shaggy dog exposition, which usually prefaces the discussion with her guest, ends here at the 10:40 mark, at which point she mentions Nebraska's particular circumstances before introducing Senator Ken Haar to her audience.
You may want to skip ahead, though doing so means you'll miss an examination of GOP tactics in other states to make scientists kow-tow to right wing political correctness.

Here's how the interview ended:

Haar: The perversion of this study, as I would call it, happened in a committee that's supposed to carry out this study — that's supposed to find someone to do this study and report back to the governor and legislature. So it's the committee appointed by the governor, that has made this decision, which is not the intent of the legislation, that it should exclude anything that has to do with humans. In fact, it would almost be funny, Rachel, if it weren't so serious, but the study in my bill asks that we look at what climate science tells us about agriculture, water, wildlife, ecosystems, forests, outdoor recreation — all the kinds of things that will be affected by climate change. And then they go on to say, "But it can only be natural causes like volcanoes and solar variations."So... you know, I can tell them exactly what's going to happen to Nebraska recreation if that volcano in Yellowstone blows up again. You know, we're going to be under 20 feet of ash. But volcanos are not cyclical, they're not predictable, and so this request for information being sent out, I think is an embarassment. Maddow: Nebraska state senator Ken Haar. Thank you very much for helping us understand this tonight, sir. I know that you've got a long fight ahead on this issue. Thanks for helping us understand it. Haar: Thanks for having me. Maddow: We appreciate it... Amazing. You can go study agriculture in this intensely agricultural state that has had huge issues with both drought and flooding and you are limited to studying whether it comes from volcanoes or solar flares. [Laughing] Get right on that! Anything else will make us too uncomfortable. It's just amazing.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Nebraska State Senator Ken Haar, widelyconsidered to be an environmental leaderin Nebraska's Unicameral

Joanne Young, of the Lincoln Journal-Star reports that Haar was asked to fly to Minneapolis to appear on the "Rachel Maddow Show" on Tuesday night to discuss the climate change debate in Nebraska.
From Young's story:

Sen. Ken Haar's priority bill (LB583) in the 2013 session required a study on the effects of climate change in Nebraska on agriculture, water, wildlife, ecosystems and outdoor recreation. It was his intent, he said, that the study look at all causes of climate change equally. But the request for information sent out by the Department of Agriculture on Monday defined cyclical climate change to mean "a change in the state of climate due to natural internal processes and only natural external forcings such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations." That definition violates both the explicit language and the intent of the bill, he said. During the legislative session, at the urging of Omaha Sen. Beau McCoy, who disputes human involvement in global warming, the senators ultimately modified LB583 to study "cyclical" climate change.

I was also intrigued by a crater shown at the 1:50 mark, which looks
like it got filled by a landslide off a nearby hill. Mars isn’t what you
might call geologically active, but it does commonly suffer landslides
and avalanches when the frozen carbon dioxide ice under the surface
sublimates (turns directly from a solid into a gas), which can dislodge
material. If that happens at the top of a hill or cliff, material can cascade down dramatically. I strongly suspect that’s what we’re seeing in this video.

...In 1980, Cameron left the University of Nebraska and took up private practice as a psychologist in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1982, when the Lincoln City Council asked residents to vote on a proposal to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation,
Cameron led the opposition as chairman of the Committee to Oppose
Special Rights for Homosexuals. Despite his earlier moderate position on
teenage relationships, Cameron had come to take a hard-line stance on
the topic of homosexuality.
He has stated that his approach, emphasising the harms he believed to
be caused by homosexual behavior and its acceptance, was influenced by
his work on the "lethal" behavior of smokers. During the campaign in Lincoln, Cameron delivered a speech at the University of Nebraska
Lutheran chapel. This drew much attention after he stated that a
four-year-old boy had suffered a brutal homosexual assault in a local mall.
[Gateway Mall — AKSARBENT] Police were unable to confirm the incident,
and Cameron acknowledged that he had heard the story only as a rumor. On
May 11, Lincoln voters rejected the proposed measure by a 4–1 margin.

Cameron has made a career out of publishing statistics that seek to
bolster the argument that homosexuality is harmful to society and leads
to suicide, drug addiction, and depression, which the civil rights
organization the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “hate literature masquerading as legitimate science.” ...[Alexander] Sidyakin is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and is
the author of a law that imposes stiff penalties on NGOs who receive
money from abroad and do not register as “foreign agents.” Based
on his tweets, the roundtable seemed to be intensifying the drumbeat in
favor of laws targeting gay and lesbian parents. A pending proposal to
away their children was recently withdrawn
by its sponsor, Deputy Alexei Zhuravlyov, but he has promised to
re-introduce it after some tweaks are made to its wording. Russia has
already banned citizens of countries that have approved same-sex
marriage from adopting Russian children. Sidyakin tweeted that
Cameron’s statistics should silence critics of the law criminalizing
“promoting non-traditional sexual relations to minors”

Below: Cameron, interviewed by David Pakman, makes a surprising admission.

Today at about 11 a.m. we pulled this screencap of important things Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert wants the media to know about. Any thoughts on the three-day-old hate crime that is dragging the City's and State's name through the mud on the Internet, Ms. Mayor? Nah. Crickets.

Parody twitter account of Omaha Mayor "Mean Jean"

At least Jean Stothert's deep-as-the-Platte concern for gay Omahans and their friends hasn't wavered since she was a council­woman. Give her props for consistency:

Please believe AKSARBENT when it says the hooting from our computer was because we were laughing AT the 'phobes and not with them. We're sure the St. Louis Cardinals are a very nice team. At left you can see what Google's unquestioning servers served up when users search for the team on Google.

Ryan Langenegger was bashed after three Old MarketPepperjax customers harassed two of his gay friends,one of whom was in drag, then followed them outsidewhen they abruptly left. Langenegger got facial bruising,a gash and two chipped teeth. The rather stupidassailants have apparently left a trail which includescredit card receipts and security camera footage.

(Note: Although WOWT allows embedding of their video, AKSARBENT can't show it to you because it's way too big for our biggest column and can't be resized. KMTV allows embedding too, but their video of this incident rudely autoplays and doesn't stop when the piece ends. Sigh.)

Ryan Kellenegger, via WOWT:

"I see this happen all the time with my friends and it’s
really sickening it’s 2013, we live in Omaha, a lot of people don’t
realize that this stuff is going on and it's just not right, and I'm
just not going to stand by and watch my friends and pretty much family
get degraded its just not right."

The assault happened last Saturday night about 2 a.m. when Ryan Langenegger and his two friends, Josh Foo and
Jacob Gellinger, were eating at the Pepperjax Grill in the Old Market

"We were eating and there was three guys watching us and
one of them stepped up and was a foot or two away from my friend [Gellinger] and he just kept saying should I should I?" Langenegger
explained. Gellinger said eventually he told the men, "I know I'm a boy
in a dress." Kellenegger said the men then told Gellinger, "Yeah,
you're disgusting and more colorful language and insisted on using more
derogatory toward my two friends."

At that point the three decided to leave the restaurant (at 12th & Howard), but they were followed out the door and cut off.

"I stepped in and said hey we aren’t looking for any
trouble and as I’m talking to him one of his friends from the corner of
my eye comes up and hits me in the face and I stand up and he also
swings at my other friend and misses and I just look at him and say why?
There's no reason for this." The friends say they are upset because they were minding their own business and didn't do anything to provoke the fight.

Now, Sen. Feinstein wants a total review of intelligence programs. Here's her statement:

Oct 28 2013Feinstein Statement on Intelligence Collection of Foreign LeadersWashington—Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.) today issued the following statement on reports the
National Security Agency has conducted surveillance on leaders of
foreign countries:
“It is abundantly clear that a total review of all
intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate
Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being
carried out by the intelligence community.
“Unlike NSA’s collection of phone records under a court
order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been
in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence
Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs
to be strengthened and increased.
“With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of
U.S. allies—including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany—let me state
unequivocally: I am totally opposed.
“Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a
country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I
do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or
emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers. The president should
be required to approve any collection of this sort.
“It is my understanding that President Obama was not aware
Chancellor Merkel’s communications were being collected since 2002. That
is a big problem.
“The White House has informed me that collection on our
allies will not continue, which I support. But as far as I’m concerned,
Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing.
To that end, the committee will initiate a major review into all
intelligence collection programs.”

Recently, part-time antiplagiarism activist Rachel Maddow excoriated Rand Paul for lifting uncredited sections of Wikipedia in a speech. Maddow has indignantly spoken out against the practice before (here at 1:36.)
Problem is, her show can hardly afford to be holier-than-thou. Below is what was visited on a videographer during Occupy protests covered by The Rachel Maddow Show:

Later the MSNBC show made nice with Peter Brauer in its blog, but the program didn't stop its practice.
Below is a screen cap from twelve seconds of clips from an AKSARBENT YouTube video used by The Rachel Maddow Show (at the 1:13 mark here),all of which were cropped to hide the AKSARBENT bug at the lower right of the frame (at the 1:11 mark here.)
In other words, in our case, The Rachel Maddow Show engaged in (legal) plagiarism of AKSARBENT when it would have been easier not to do so.
We like Rachel Maddow here at AKSARBENT and often embed videos from her show, but sheesh — lay off the accusations until whoever it is on your staff who assembles video clips starts walking the walk.UPDATE: We saw Nebraska State Senator Ken Haar on Maddow discussing a proposed climate change study and the sabotage thereof by the Nebraska GOP and noticed that the Maddow show now is meticulously tagging the YouTube videos it appropriates. Good.

Compare and contrast: When CNN used AKSARBENT video, it didn't attempt to obscure our bug; in fact it added another credit showing where it got the clip. (It also cleaned up our rather dreary audio — thanks, CNN!)

Monday, October 28, 2013

This is pretty good. Paxman (who is much better than the Brit newsman we get on CNN, Piers Morgan)asked a number of interesting questions, such as why his audience should listen to the political views of a man who refuses to vote. Brand refuted every skeptical query effectively. Here is one playful exchange:

Brand: It can't just be because of that beard. It's gorgeous... The day... you don't want it, I do. Grow it longer. Tangle it into your armpit hair.Paxman: You are a very trivial man.

In between getting Buffett to strum a uke CNN bought for him to play and displaying the contents of his wallet, Piers might have found time to ask a serious question or two about recent nasty revelations about the dozens of lawsuits filed against Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries National Indemnity and Resolute Management for wrongfully delaying or denying (in order to boost Berkshire's profits) compensation from asbestos and pollution policies to people dying of cancer.Scripps recently reported that in multiple cases, courts and arbitrators have ruled that the Berkshire subsidiaries' tactics have been in "bad
faith" or intentional. And it's not just sick victims who are mad: large
corporations like Ford, Estee Lauder, and other companies
whose commercial policies were bought from or sold to Berkshire Hathaway
subsidiaries are now suing for reimbursement of fines, legal fees and payments of injury claims.
Morgan also might have asked why one of the subsidiaries of the 'people's billionaire', Nebraska Furniture Mart, will be, according to the Dallas Morning News, the happy beneficiary of $802,000,000 in financial and tax incentives for building one new store in The Colony, a city of just 20,000, north of Dallas.
Morgan also might have asked why Berkshire Hathaway recently received an HRC score of zero and whether Warren Buffett is as homophobic as some writers think.

This is not Photoshop snark. It is an actual title slide from
the Department of Defense's "Armed With Science" interview
with Gen. Alexander at the 12:36 mark. Click to enlarge

Well, first, they aren't spying programs. So, I would correct the title of them. These are — one is called the business records, uh FISA program or section 215 and the other is called FISA MMX 702 or Prism...
Josh Gerstein, of Politico, which posted the video, quoted the general about his view of the correct way that newspapers should report news about the NSA: "I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these
documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving
them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense," Alexander
said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science"
blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to
do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my
perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director
declared.Alexander did not elaborate on what he meant by reporters "selling"
documents or what options he might consider for halting the disclosures.
An NSA spokeswoman declined to expand on the general's comments.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

We like the narrator, who is benevolently, but dispassionately observant. She noted that after Charley, the horse, died, the health of Jack, the goat, quickly went downhill even though the animal seemed, on the surface, to have taken the death of his longtime companion in stride.

Via Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, comes a truly fascinating New York Times op-ed exposé of how legalized extortion now plays out in Washington.

How John Boehner does it with tollbooth tactics: In 2011, he collected a total of over $200,000 in donations from executives and companies in the days before holding votes on just three bills. He delayed scheduling a vote for months on the widely supported Wireless Tax Fairness Act, and after he finally announced a vote, 37 checks from wireless-industry executives totaling nearly $40,000 rolled in. He also delayed votes on the Access to Capital for Job Creators Act and the Small Company Capital Formation Act, scoring $91,000 from investment banks and private equity firms, $32,450 from bank holding companies and $46,500 from self-described investors — all in the 48 hours between scheduling the vote and the vote’s actually being held on the House floor.

How Obama does it with a milker bill: In the first half of 2011, Silicon Valley had chipped in only $1.7 million to Mr. Obama’s political campaign. The president announced that he would “probably” sign antipiracy legislation — a stance that pleased Hollywood and incensed Silicon Valley. The tech industry then poured millions into Mr. Obama’s coffers in the second half of 2011. By January of 2012, Hollywood had donated $4.1 million to Mr. Obama. Then, suddenly, on Jan. 14, 2012, the White House announced that it had problems with the antipiracy bills and neither passed.

By now it seems pretty clear that Senator Ted Cruz has a plan to occupy the White House. But he doesn’t want people to know too much about it. And he definitely doesn’t want you to know about the special interests that have already begun to bankroll…

One thing you probably won't be seeing on Russia Today is coverage of Russia's SORM program, an even more intrusive version of the NSA's prism program which, with deep packet inspection capability, will allow Russia's security agency, the FSB, new telephone and internet spying capabilities that will give it free rein to intercept any telephony or data traffic and even track the use of sensitive words or phrases mentioned in emails, webchats and on social media at Sochi during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.
Such drastically intrusive monitoring of Olympians and other attendees will easily allow Russian authorities to stop any gay demonstrations or criticism of Russian LGBT abuse before they even start.

Last year, homeschooled GOP State Sen. Beau McCoy, of Elkhorn, a western Omaha suburb, tried to outlaw municipal antibias LGBT ordinances statewide when he introduced LB912, subsequently killed in the Judiciary Committee.
It seems he also has put his evangelical thumb on the scale of a proposed climate change study — he got language added to LB583 to focus the study on "cyclical" climate change, a term that state climatologist Al Dutcher said the scientific community does not recognize and doesn't use because it offers no clarity.
McCoy, who owns a roofing company, appears to care less about science than his recklessly deviant personal "philosophical" views on global warming and wants to make sure the state tows the line on his denialism. He said this last year:

"I, for one, and this is a philosophical position, don't subscribe to global warming, to that theory. I think there are normal cyclical and rhythmic climate changes that are not caused by man-made attempts."

Leading climate and weather scientists in Nebraska are having nothing to do with this latest of McCoy's tricks.

Barbara Mayes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service also noted that "cyclical" is not a scientific term.

Mike Hayes, director of UNL's National Drought Mitigation Center, said, "We would
be uncomfortable in sending it to our peers within the scientific
community if the human component wasn't included. For me, it's really
tough to separate those out. Everything with climate is connected with humans."

Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm, a Democrat and an environmental leader in the Unicameral, said his intent was to examine all aspects of
climate change. He said that any analysis that rejected science and
excluded the role of humans would make the state “look stupid... 'Let's just embrace ignorance, and let our children deal with the consequences.' That's what that sounds like,” he said.

Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the university's
acclaimed National Drought Mitigation Center, said he wouldn't send out a study proposal to his peers if it excluded the
role of humans.

Climatologist Martha Shulski, director of the High Plains Regional
Climate Center, said of the study's scope:“If it's only natural (causes), but not human, we would not be interested.”

Asked
after the meeting whether “cyclical” includes or excludes human
influences on climate change, Kriz-Wickham declined to answer and
instead referred to the Legislature's floor debate and final bill. Kriz-Wickham is the assistant director of the Department of Agriculture, which
answers to the Governor's Office. The climate committee also is under the umbrella of the Governor's Office. Sue Roush, spokeswoman for Gov. Dave Heineman, said his office does not plan to become directly involved in defining “cyclical.” She said Heineman believes that should
be left to the committee.

Jason Pickel and Darren Blackbear were going to travel to Iowa to get married, but a call to tribal authorities revealed they didn't have to: they live within the tribe's jurisdiction and are of native American descent so they were able to get married on a Okalahoma Cheyenne/Arapahoe reservation since no gender criteria are specified and the jurisdiction is not bound by Oklahoma's prohibition of marriage equality. They were told to "Come one down. It's 20 bucks."
Now, however, some tribal homophobes, like Chief of Staff Ida Hoffman, want to put a stop to tribal same sex marraiges.

Here we see Francisco Gallardo (note that in Spanish, as in French, double l's usually have a "Y" pronunciation, if you catch AKSARBENT's drift) demonstrating why, in November of 2001 he was fined and suspended by the Royal Spanish Football Federation merely for congrat­ulating a teammate on a goal.

Mugshot of Shepard Smith following Florida arrest
for aggravated battery during aftermath of 2000
presidential election. Shepard deliberately bumped
reporter Maureen Walsh with his car during a
parking space altercation

After annoyed Fox News personality Shepard Smith, 49, unleashed an f-bomb tirade on a waitress at New York's Bathtub Gin bar for not serving his party another round quickly enough, the equally-annoyed server mentioned during her recounting of Smith's misbehavior that he had been accompanied by his boyfriend, Penn State grad 26-year-old Giovanni Graziano, who, while not as hot as Anderson Cooper's boyfriend, is certainly not bad looking.
Graziano evidently works at Fox too, but don't tell Roger Ailes, okay?

House GOP party hack Blackburn, from Tennessee, lately has repeated the Tea Party charge that, in violation of ACA, consumers are "sharing" their "health information" with multiple insurers as they compare rates, despite the fact that the only thing remotely related to health information collected by the ACA website is the question about whether the inquirer smokes.
CNN's Carol Costello asked Blackburn at least five times what information gathered by the ACA website violates HIPAA, and five times Blackburn refused to answer the question and refused to be accountable for her reckless, unsubstantiated claim.
Instead, she attempted to cover her tracks with a crudely obvious diversion — trying to explain how the structure of the ACA website might be fraught with privacy perils. In so doing, what Rep. Blackburn ended up exposing was her own technological stupidity, to whit:

Now when you have a company that is utilizing at least 80 or 100 different servers, whether they're physical or cloud servers...

Friday, October 25, 2013

We noticed, via JoeMyGod, that the Huffington Post has taken notice of the UN human rights office's Free & Equal campaign — a series of ads imitative of the UN Women campaign, which shows Google autocomplete search suggestions when a user substitutes "gays" for some of the expressions spotlighted in the UN Women campaign. Below: Bing isn't going there. Guess it learned its lesson from the autocomplete suggestions it made for "women need to..."

Go to WOWT's website for the video, here. (The station generously allows its video to be embedded, but stupidly doesn't allow the video to be resized to fit the space requirements of various blogs; their videos are too big for AKSARBENT. )

Well this is different. Usually antigay initiatives at Catholic Universities are top-down, not bottom-up. And usually it's the administration overruling progay, not antigay students.
In Omaha, the
Creighton Students Union Program Board was about to begin giving away some 50-75 free ticket vouchers for an upcoming Macklemore & Ryan Lewis concert at the CenturyLink Center (the duo's last Omaha venue was at Sokal Hall).
We say "about" because the giveaway was delayed while university officials pondered whether to cancel the promotion after Creighton's Catholic Student Organization protested.

James Doyle, president
of Creighton U's Catholic
Student Organization,
which failed to stop
distribution of tickets
for Macklemore & Ryan
Lewis concert

Kevin Coffey, of the Omaha World-Herald,reported that the group sent letters to the student union
and the Rev. Timothy Lannon, Creighton's president, and that the group's president, James Doyle (a fine undergraduate gift to Omaha from Central Texas and Topeka, Kansas), wrote, in a letter obtained by the Herald, that"when artists so
deliberately and outwardly advocate such a position [marriage equality], they should not be
publicly supported."
Two offended members of the Class of 2016, Ben Thompson and his best girl, Christina Laubenthal (a bartender/server at the (seriously) Outing Club of Des Moines), dashed off a long letter to the Creightonian objecting to ticket giveaway: "We at Creighton pride ourselves on being a Catholic school with
strong Catholic values, and we believe we are still that university.
With concern for its integrity, we urge Creighton to resist popular
practice and instead hold itself to the highest moral standards. Please
continue Creighton’s tradition of excellence in this area; cancel the
CSU Program Board vouchers for Macklemore & Ryan Lewis."
The letter stirred up a hornet's nest of progay Creighton students so great that they crashedthe website of the university's student newspaper. The authors of the antigay letter have now clammed up, refusing to be interviewed by KETV.

After delaying the voucher giveaway, Creighton officials cancelled the moratorium, adding that the school is committed not to “endorse
issues that are contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church” but reminding the public that “in the past, the university has hosted debates on the issue
of same-sex marriage. We have had open sessions on this topic which
centered on (Catholic) tenets of understanding and inclusion.”
According to the World-Herald:

Since
“Same Love” was released, Macklemore and Lewis have performed on some
Catholic college campuses, including Boston College, University of San
Francisco and St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Universal Studios, not usually an LGBT-phobic company, was called out recently by vice.com for the stereotypically gay, stereotypically racist and rape joke-laden "Halloween Horror Nights," entitled "Bill and Ted's
Excellent Halloween Adventure." After the Huffington Post's Gay Voices section piled on, here and here, Universal cancelled (rather than revised) the show and tried to remove the fair-comment evidence on Google-owned YouTube, which seemed largely, but evidently not totally cooperative, — unless Universal somehow missed this clip of similar shenanigans in 2006:

Wow. It isn't every day that Hollywood's Obama backers draw a straight line from Nixon to him.
We always thought that a coalition of tree huggers and tea partiers would be Washington's worst nightmare, and now that the NSA has managed to piss off both groups, that's exactly what we'll see this weekend at the U.S. Capitol.
AKSARBENT hasn't been this excited about the conjoining of strange bedfellows since Brokeback Mountain's staggered theatrical release.
Maybe this will have some effect on the silent, apathetic, I-have-nothing-to-hide-so-why-should-I-worry-about-the-construction-of-the-infrastructure-of-totalitarianism majority. Stay tuned.
From the YouTube description:

StopWatching.us is a coalition of more than 100 public advocacy
organizations and companies from across the political spectrum. Join the
movement at https://rally.stopwatching.us.
This video harnesses the voices of celebrities, activists, legal
experts, and other prominent figures in speaking out against mass
surveillance by the NSA. Please share widely to help us spread the
message that we will not stand for the dragnet surveillance of our
communications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a
nonprofit civil liberties law and advocacy center that has been fighting
the NSA's unconstitutional spying for years. Learn more at https://eff.org.

NBC's Richard Engle:"Friends don't like friends reading their mail... especially if everybody finds out about it... There is a growing impression around the world that Washington spies on its friends, on its enemies and even on its own citizens and over time, Brian, this has a corrosive effect on the United States, which claims to respect free speech."
The companion story on NBC's website delves into diplomatic blowback from NSA spying on other countries. Today, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the U.S. wasn't intercepting German Chancellor Merkel's communications and wasn't going to, but he didn't say anything about the past.

KETV aired a piece about this on its 6 pm newscast; anchor Melissa Fry went to school with him. The story notes that "In 2012 he had a role in the movie “Pitch Perfect.” Since 2011, he has produced and stared [sic] in Workaholics on Comedy Central."
AKSARBENT wishes Fry had told her viewers what he was staring at, because we don't subscribe to cable and would like to know whether he was peering at a cast member or something off camera.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are rapidly spinning out of control and are terrorizing hospitals and physicians (who exacerbated the problem by over-prescribing antibiotics.) Tomorrow's installment of FRONTLINEinvestigates just that issue — the rise of deadly, drug-resistant bacteria that modern antibiotics cannot kill.
“Twenty-five years ago, there were more than 25 large companies working
to discover and develop new antibiotics,” infectious disease doctor Brad
Spellberg told FRONTLINE. “Now there’s two, maybe three.”
Craig Venter wants to build a machine to "print" a digitized
genetic blueprint of a bacteriophage (a bacteria-killing virus) to his proposed Digital Biological Converter (DBC.) It will build the phage, and then his team at the Venter Institute will infect a bacteria with it.

If the bacteria dies, the test worked. Once
they've gotten this worked out, they'll start constructing a machine
that automatically inserts the newly built DNA into a cell that's had
its own genetic material removed. The new DNA would program the cell to
develop into the "e-mailed" organism.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Both the videographer (David Hall) and the vandal (Glenn Taylor) have now been kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America. Taylor, it turns out, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed last month stemming from a 2009 car accident. He's suing driver Cassie MacDonald and her father, Alan, who owned the car, claiming he “endure(d) great pain and
suffering, disability, impairment, loss of joy of life” as a result of
the minor collision. The defendant, Alan MacDonald is a former personal injury lawyer.

Hommen is a group of antiLGBT French male exhibitionists who like to protest.
Recently they visited the offices of Femen to yell chants at them and to throw brassieres at the windows.
Femen is a Ukrainian group of feminist exhibitionists who protest in favor of women's and LGBT rights.
Naturally, where there are exhibitionists, there is video, here discovered by @Str8grandmother and posted on JMG.
Only in France are political protests built around a Mardi Gras / West Side Story theme, except that no beads were thrown, although some may or may not have been read. We don't know. We only speak high school French.

It's always helpful to have a powerful union on your side when you misbehave.
Andrew Harrelson, a gaming officer in Council Bluffs, was ordered reinstated today in a ruling that wasn't immediatelymade public. He denied involvement in the unusual training exercise of a fellow recruit in 2008. Trooper Joshua Guhl, who did admit involvement, was also reinstated because an arbitrator found that the state failed to discipline other hazers who took part in the attempt to get another recruit to quit. How the ruling in Guhl's case came to light is interesting:

The Department of Administrative Services said Wednesday that Nathan's
ruling must be kept secret based on advice from the Iowa Attorney
General's Office, which argues that such decisions are confidential
personnel records. But another agency, the Public Employment Relations
Board, released a copy to the AP, shedding light on a case that had been
shrouded in secrecy.

Guhl served in Iraq, where he learned the powder hazing technique, known as bonding, in the United States Marine Corps.

From the video: "I believe that justice demands fairness. It requires careful and intelligent probing of evidence." This is something that the Nebraska State Patrol and authorities in Cass and Douglas counties might want to take more seriously.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

This is just stupid branding run amuck on the flag of the Kansas City Star, a fine newspaper which should put a stop to the marketers and "creative" types who are probably now embarrassing the actual journalists and copy editors at the paper.

Scripps interviewed more than 20 sources — some confidential — reviewed dozens of lawsuits and spoke with former insiders, who all allege the Berkshire-owned companies that handle its asbestos and pollution policies — National Indemnity Co. and Resolute Management Inc. — wrongfully delay or deny compensation to cancer victims and others to boost Berkshire's profits. In multiple cases, courts and arbitrators have ruled that the Berkshire subsidiaries' tactics have been in "bad faith" or intentional.

Through 25 known deals, insurers like American Insurance Group, CNA Financial Corp. and Lloyd's of London have paid Berkshire to assume their risk for tens of billions of dollars in future asbestos and pollution claims.

It's not just asbestos cancer victims that are mad: dozens of large corporations are also livid. Ford, Estee Lauder, and other companies whose commercial policies were bought from or sold to Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries are now suing for reimbursement of fines, legal fees and payments of injury claims.

If you landed here because you thought we were talking about those three twink spawns of Disney, Inc., consider yourself rick-rolled by art on a higher plane. This post is about an actual grown-up — German tenor Jonus Kaufmann as Don José in the 2006 Royal Opera Company production of Carmen in Covent Gardens.Mostly Opera said Kaufmann (and Anna Caterina Antonacci) were "shattering as the leads with stage chemistry and acting making this, by far, the best Carmen on DVD."

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Omaha's Croesus, Warren Buffett, was on CNBC's Squawk Box earlier this week. In the video below, he gave some free advice to the GOP: don't screw up two centuries of good credit that the U.S. has built. On other topics (not in the video below) he talked about the recent departures of two of his Benjamin Moore CEOs and the continuing drag that healthcare, American-style, is on the economy.

Healthcare is the tapeworm of the American economy. When u get up to 17-18 percent and other countries have 10%, You've got 7 or 8 cents out of the dollar that we are at a disadvantage – I mean we think we are at a disadvantage and we are because we talked about the $500 billion spent on foreign oil but $500 billion is 3% of GDP. We're talking about a huge cost disadvantage versus rest of world, and we need to address it.

A spokesperson for Alexei Zhuravlyov, the far right MP who
tabled the bill, later confirmed the move, but said it would be
resubmitted after some changes were made. ...Support for the bill in question was always less clear cut. Elena Mizulina, the sponsor of the federal propaganda law and the public face of Russia’s anti-LGBT campaign, repeatedly said she believed it would not pass.
The decision to withdraw the bill comes one month after it cleared a bureaucratic hurdle that put it on the agenda to be considered as soon as February 2014. That is the month that Russia is set to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi — something that has already pointed global
attention to the country’s abysmal record on LGBT rights.
Activists welcomed the move cautiously, with some predicting that it would be
brought for consideration again once the global spotlight on Russia fades after the Olympics conclude. “Are they putting on a good face before a bad game?” one asked. “Let’s not relax.”

Obviously this picture, taken by AKSARBENT in 2012,
is not of Katharine Sprague's car, but we think
whoever did this is totally amazing and
we'll use any excuse to repost it.

The driver, an Omaha woman, was struck by a turning vehicle; her car was pushed up a limestone wall. From the World-Herald:

[Katharine M.] Sprague’s attorneys, Lynn Shumway of Phoenix and John Weis of Omaha,
presented evidence that the air bag didn’t fully inflate... Attorneys for Toyota,
the manufacturer of Lexus luxury vehicles, suggested to jurors that the
way Sprague was sitting in the driver’s seat — and the fact that her
seat belt was not taut against her body — contributed to the extent of
her injuries.

This happened in Hartland Township, Michigan to a "temporary" employee of Walmart, which considers hirees not really hired until half a year has elapsed, during which time we assume the company's health insurance, such as it is, is not available to them.

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.